Improvisation for Beginners: Awakening Your Inner Composer

I am a far better performer since I started improvising regularly and composing again, and I was lucky to have explored this well before I entered college. “Making stuff up” in response to what was happening in my life and the world around me helped me survive Middle and High School.

Now I regularly employ these strategies as a professional composer, and I am passionate about giving other performers the opportunity to explore their own artistic voice before the filter becomes affixed too tightly. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven all played and wrote, and what they wrote or improvised informed how they played.

This workshop is for any age and skill level that gets young classical musicians off the page, addresses the need to release our desire to be “perfect,” tap into our innate creative abilities, and rediscover how music was created to express the experience of being human.

Warm-up excerpt

This is part of a sequential warm-up I did with all 250 kids of the National Youth Orchestras of Carnegie Hall that got them making composerly decisions right away to express different emotions/ideas.

Resulting piece

After a series of scaffolded improvisation exercises and brainstorming what artists comment about in their work, students then got into small groups and in 25 minutes composed pieces. This one is titled “Lonely World”, which is a theme that is becoming all too common when I work with teenagers.